When JD Vance sat down for an interview with the New York Times, he might have expected that it would barely cause a stir. He is, after all, relegated to the undercard as Donald Trump’s running mate.
But Vance managed to make headlines when he repeatedly refused to say that Trump had lost the 2020 election. Along the way, he delivered a master class in the kind of rhetorical maneuvering that is typical of the way authoritarians regard and use language.
As the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, “Authoritarians turn language into a weapon, as well as emptying key words in the political life of a nation…of meaning.” They “are nihilists…and this nihilism also affects language.” Their verbiage “means nothing: it is just a show, a display of egotistical ranting, and a distraction….”
Reading Vance’s New York Times interview, one sees his skill in deploying some well-known rhetorical techniques as well as his nihilism and desire to distract.
His performance also is a vivid reminder of what may unfold if Trump loses the upcoming election. But whatever happens this year, Vance was signaling that he can be relied on to protect and propagate the Big Lie in the future.
In his devotion to the Big Lie, Vance knows that he has a receptive audience not just within the Republican Party but in large segments of the American population. Where once Americans took the integrity of elections for granted, today that is no longer the case. Vance also knows that Democrats still have not figured out a way to restore confidence in the electoral process.
Before looking at what Vance’s nihilism and rhetorical skill mean for this country, let’s look at the artful dodging he displayed in the New York Times interview. Let’s also recall the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s warning about rhetoric, which he called “the art of enchanting the soul.”
Professor Atilla Hallsby notes that Plato thought such enchantment was “dangerous because it is a way of producing a ‘fake’ reality…. He says that it is less like medicine than ‘cookery’…. [and] because it is just ‘cookery, rhetoric often sounds, looks, tastes, and smells good while in fact worsening the health of its listeners.”
In his conversation with the Times, Vance’s cookery began when the interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, asked him “Do you believe that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election?” Vance first responded by reiterating his “I am focused on the future” line from the recent Vice Presidential debate.
“I think that Donald Trump and I have raised a number of issues about the 2020 election,” Vance said. ”But, we are focused on the future.”
“I think,” Vance continued, “that there’s an obsession here with the 2020 election.” Then he pivoted to his well-rehearsed criticism of the Biden/Harris Administration’s record. “I am much more worried about what happened after 2020 which is a wide-open border, grocery prices that are unaffordable….”
Here Vance showed himself to be a master of “bridging,” one of the key strategies for avoiding a question. Bridging “involves acknowledging, not ignoring, the question…then moving on to one of your key messages.”
Before Vance could complete his anti-Harris messaging, Garcia-Navarro interrupted him and asked again about the 2020 election. In response, Vance moved on from bridging to “what aboutism,” which is standard fare in the MAGA playbook.
Along the way, he managed to double down on the conspiratorial thinking that feeds election denialism. Vance suggested that Garcia-Navarro should be focusing on “big technology companies” and the way they had buried the Hunter Biden laptop story. He claimed that “independent analysts have said (it) cost Donald Trump millions of votes.”
Round 3 in the effort to get Vance to say whether Trump lost in 2020 unfolded when Garcia-Navarro again pressed the issue. This time his rhetorical ploy was to answer her question with a question of his own.
“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost President Trump millions of votes? That’s the question.”
The next move that Vance deployed is the “hold your ground” tactic. He did that when Garcia-Navarro again asked, “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”
At this point, Vance was so confident of his advantage in the interview that he admitted, “I’ve answered your questions with another question.” He then challenged Garcia-Navarro to “answer my question,” and “I’ll answer yours.”
Clearly frustrated, she upped the ante. “There is no proof legal or otherwise that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election,” Garcia-Navarro insisted.
Sensing her frustration, Vance pressed his advantage. “You’re repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying.”
He reiterated the accusation that technology firms had engaged in “industrial scale censorship” that was “backed up by the federal government.” And he used the occasion to burnish his “man of the people” credentials.
“I’m worried about Americans who feel like they were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about the slogan people throw ‘well every court case went this way.’ I’m talking about…a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020 and, more importantly, led to Kamala Harris’s governance which has screwed this country up in a big way.”
Note the symmetry in the way Vance brought the fifth iteration of Garcia-Navarro’s question back to his original indictment of the Biden-Harris administration. He even managed to assure Garcia-Navarro that “we’re going to respect results in 2024 [because] I feel very confident they’re going to make Donald Trump the next president of the United States.”
Vance employed the familiar Trumpian conditional; they will respect the election results if Trump wins.
No wonder Vance is a hero to the MAGA faithful. He is Trump without the many of the rough edges.
What he lacks in charisma, he makes up for by his obvious intelligence and ability to calmly fend off efforts to get him to face facts and embrace truth. What the Washington Post’s Philip Bump said about Vance’s performance in the Vice Presidential debate also applies to his conversation with Garcia-Navarro.
“[N]early a decade into Trump’s dominance of the GOP,” Bump wrote, “we got a glimpse…of how Trumpism will evolve: more polish and more traditional political mannerisms doing a better job of masking the extremism and dishonesty that define Trump’s politics.”
Or, as the author Brea Baker observed after the debate, “No matter what happens this November, Vance…will continue to capitalize on cosplaying as a working-class, relatable person…. Though he packages his rhetoric better than Trump, marketing and branding won’t change that he’s peddling poison and calling it the American dream.”
Vance’s New York Times interview was a virtuoso example of “peddling poison and calling it the American dream.” If Plato were alive today, he would hold up that interview as a prime example of the vices of the skilled rhetorician.
What Vance did there suggests that if he is indeed Trump’s heir apparent, it will be a long time before America purges itself of Trumpism’s destructive assault on the linguistic commitments necessary to doing the work of a constitutional democracy.